Playing on the boundaries: a childhood across cultural and geographical lines

This is not a conventional paper. It is a personal narrative. It is subjective not only to its author but to the child-self of the author. It is not a detached academic look at a personal history. In fact it could be described more as ‘archaeological’ than historical; an examination of what appears to be a random collection of fragments of a personal history, found in memory and artefacts of a childhood. The telling of the story is an attempt to understand the development and trajectory of an individual identity across geographical, cultural, and religious boundaries. It is not the whole story, but it gives the writer and the reader a few selected pieces of the full picture

Coldness and Cruelty as Performance in Deleuze's Proust

This book is an encounter between Deleuze the philosopher, Proust the novelist, and Beckett the writer creating interdisciplinary and inter-aesthetic bridges between them, covering textual, visual, sonic and performative phenomena, ..

Datocracy

Datocracy is a compound neologism that embraces transhistorical liberations and reconfigurations of data, in its multiple perceptual-linguistic forms, into new value relations and systems of governance, democratic or otherwise. Datocracy evolves from the often-violent separation of data from its habitual matrices, by virtue of dispositifs, or apparatuses, as defined by Michel Foucault and elaborated by Gilles Deleuze. This paper examines material examples of the functioning of such dispositifs through Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, François Rabelais (through Mikhail Bakhtin), and William Burroughs. These examples demonstrate how emancipated data is readily recuperated into new relations of governance, as liberatory socio-political tools (or apparatuses), or vehicles of tyranny. In its passage between liberation and recuperation, in its state of utterance, perhaps, data experiences a protosemantic moment, a pre-definitional state, which offers the promise of a momentary escape from, or rather within, value relations

The relational ethics of conflict and identity

The contemporary psychoanalytically inflected vocabulary of relational ethics centres on acknowledgement, witnessing and responsibility. It has become an important code for efforts to connect with otherness across fractures of hurt, oppression and suffering. One can see the deployment of this vocabulary to challenge patterns of exclusion and dehumanisation in zones of intense political conflict in many situations in which destructive hatred reigns. This paper traces some of the use of and disputes over this ‘acknowledgement-based’ relational ethics in the recent work of Jessica Benjamin and Judith Butler. The field of application is their response to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, given their position as Jews. The challenge of the acknowledgement agenda leads back to an issue of general concern – the degree to which relational ethics can prise open apparently closed and defensive psychosocial identities

Choreography, controversy and child sex abuse: Theoretical reflections on a cultural criminological analysis of dance in a pop music video

This article was inspired by the controversy over claims of ‘pedophilia!!!!’ undertones and the ‘triggering’ of memories of childhood sexual abuse in some viewers by the dance performance featured in the music video for Sia’s ‘Elastic Heart’ (2015). The case is presented for acknowledging the hidden and/or overlooked presence of dance in social scientific theory and cultural studies and how these can enhance and advance cultural criminological research. Examples of how these insights have been used within other disciplinary frameworks to analyse and address child sex crime and sexual trauma are provided, and the argument is made that popular cultural texts such as dance in pop music videos should be regarded as significant in analysing and tracing public perceptions and epistemologies of crimes such as child sex abuse

Dangerous liaisons: youth sport, citizenship and intergenerational mistrust

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics on 24/3/2014, available online: DOI 10.1080/19406940.2014.896390This paper reflects on and offers a critical analysis of the relationship between youth sport and citizenship development, in practice and in the UK policy context of sports coaching and physical education. While deploying data and insights from a recently completed research project in England, which identified substantial tensions in intergenerational relationships in sport and coaching, the argument and analysis also invokes wider international concerns and more generally applicable implications for policy and practice. Drawing heuristically upon the philosophy of Dewey (2007 [1916]), it is recognised that the concept of citizenship as a form of social practice should seek to encourage the development of complementary traits and dispositions in young people. To develop socially and educationally thus entails engagement in meaningful social and cultural activity, of which one potentially significant component is participation in youth sport, both within and outside formal education. However, it is argued that any confident assumption that sporting and coaching contexts will necessarily foster positive traits and dispositions in young people should be considered dubious and misplaced. Deploying a Lacanian (1981) perspective to interpret our data, we contend that ‘liaisons’ and interactions between coaches and young people are often treated suspiciously, and regarded as potentially ‘dangerous’